Sunday, November 02, 2008

At first glance, I have a USB data acquisition driver in the kernel that originally some company in Germany created and they wanted to get it in and we realized that about four different companies' drivers all do the same thing, so we all merged into one. Now none of those companies have to maintain it; they all get their support for free. Users benefit in the fact that they all have one tinier code base and so the original German company is very happy about it, so they're ecstatic. They don't have to worry about it anymore and it just works for them. Actually there's another company here in Portland that uses that same driver and they're very happy about it too, so it makes people realize over time that the Linux development model has benefits but it's really hard to convince them until they've gone through that.